The Turmoil | Page 5

your husbands'
money home on Saturday night," he told them, jovially. "Smoke may
hurt your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but it's the catarrhal
climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern coughing. Smoke
makes the climate better. Smoke means good health: it makes the
people wash more. They have to wash so much they wash off the
microbes. You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in
their pockets out o' the pay-roll--and you'll come around next time to
get me to turn out more smoke instead o' chokin' it off!"
It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection
in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and
unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out
he believed it was the finest city in the world. "Finest" was his word.
He thought of it as his city as he thought of his family as his family;
and just as profoundly believed his city to be the finest city in the world,
so did he believe his family to be--in spite of his son Bibbs--the finest
family in the world. As a matter of fact, he knew nothing worth
knowing about either.
Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and
considered the failure--the "odd one"--of the family. Born during that
most dangerous and anxious of the early years, when the mother fretted

and the father took his chance, he was an ill-nourished baby, and grew
meagerly, only lengthwise, through a feeble childhood. At his
christening he was committed for life to "Bibbs" mainly through lack of
imagination on his mother's part, for though it was her maiden name,
she had no strong affection for it; but it was "her turn" to name the baby,
and, as she explained later, she "couldn't think of anything else she
liked AT ALL!" She offered this explanation one day when the sickly
boy was nine and after a long fit of brooding had demanded some
reason for his name's being Bibbs. He requested then with unwonted
vehemence to be allowed to exchange names with his older brother,
Roscoe Conkling Sheridan, or with the oldest, James Sheridan, Junior,
and upon being refused went down into the cellar and remained there
the rest of that day. And the cook, descending toward dusk, reported
that he had vanished; but a search revealed that he was in the coal-pile,
completely covered and still burrowing. Removed by force and carried
upstairs, he maintained a cryptic demeanor, refusing to utter a syllable
of explanation, even under the lash. This obvious thing was wholly a
mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and
connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious
fool, an impression not effaced as the years went by.
At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer
scaffolding of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside--a
long-shanked, long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and
haggard, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of
countenance; indeed, at first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might
well be solicitous, for he seemed upon the point of tears. But to a
slightly longer gaze, not grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion;
while a more searching scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he
seemed about to burst out crying or to burst out laughing, one or the
other, inevitably, but it was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs
never, on any occassion of his life, either laughed aloud or wept.
He was a "disappointment" to his father. At least that was the parent's
word--a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make
a "business man" of the boy. He sent Bibbs to "begin at the bottom and
learn from the ground up" in the machine-shop of the Sheridan

Automatic Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family
physician sent Bibbs to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground
up in a sanitarium.
"You needn't worry, mamma," Sheridan told his wife. "There's nothin'
the matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick.
I put him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about
as well as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty
alarmists. Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and
blood? He makes me tired!"
Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease
was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine conviction that
lack of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to
some subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound
shiftlessness or slyness. He understood typhoid